In 1981, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of the animators behind Snow White and Pinocchio, published The Illusion of Life. Inside it are twelve principles that explain why some drawings feel alive and others only move. Pete Docter, director of Inside Out, once told a festival audience that the book is the bible of animation. Forty years later, it still is.
The principles were written for characters on paper. Motion design works with cards, titles, charts and interfaces. So the question of this first newsletter is simple: which of the twelve still matter when there is no character on screen?
Short answer: all of them, but not equally. When I made my 3D short film Fala, Vô!, I used the twelve to animate two people and a paper plane. Working on brands and social media since then, I noticed that five of them do most of the work.
The five that carry motion design
- Timing. The number of frames is the emotion. Slow reads as calm, fast reads as energy.
- Slow in and slow out. Nothing in the real world starts or stops at full speed. Linear motion looks like a machine.
- Follow through and overlapping action. Things do not arrive at the same time, and they do not stop dead. In motion design this becomes stagger and settle.
- Arcs. Movement travels on curves. A card that slides on a slight arc feels thrown; one that slides in a straight line feels pushed.
- Staging. One idea at a time, placed where the eye already is.
The other seven, translated
| Principle | On a card, a title or a chart |
|---|---|
| Squash and stretch | A tiny scale change on impact, like the Pop entrance. Keep it subtle: a brand is not a rubber ball. |
| Anticipation | A small move in the opposite direction before the main move. |
| Straight ahead and pose to pose | Keyframes are pose to pose. Drift and noise are straight ahead. |
| Secondary action | A shadow that breathes, a caption that settles after the title. |
| Exaggeration | Use rarely, and only on the one thing you want remembered. |
| Solid drawing | Depth: perspective, shadow, a card that has thickness when it turns. |
| Appeal | Clarity. The piece looks intentional, not generated. |
The rule that comes out of all twelve
Read the principles closely and you notice something missing on purpose: none of them tells you to fade. A fade is the absence of motion, an image asking for permission to exist. That is why FRISO has no fade. Cards enter by flip, pop, sweep, from the camera, by falling or by turning; titles enter through a mask. It is also the fastest way to make a piece look professional.
In the next editions we take one principle at a time, with a live example and the control that changes it in FRISO.
Parts of this series come from Felipe Risallah's undergraduate thesis on the production of the 3D short film Fala, Vô! (Cinema and Audiovisual, UFES, 2023), and from The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston (1981).